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From Chapter 1 of The Day the World Discovered the Sun by Mark Anderson

Just Outside Riga, Russia (Present-Day Latvia) February 7, 1761
The screech of metal sliding over rock announced that the sleigh was stuck. No one was going anywhere. Cacophonous chatter among the Russian sleigh drivers broke the final seal on this otherwise quiet early evening. Stepping onto sled runners that had nothing to glide on, Chappe saw little else but dark. With no moon in the sky, two sources of dim light cast pale shadows on the patchy snow. To the west, the brilliant Milky Way formed a horizon-tohorizon hoop framing Chappe’s entire world. And off to the southwest beamed Venus, that tiny beacon. It was setting. For these travelers, though, the night was just beginning. Chappe’s Russian translator, hired sixteen days before in Warsaw, was drunk beyond saving. “We could neither make him listen to reason nor hold his tongue,” Chappe later wrote of his Siberian journey. 9 So the scientist was left to deal with the belligerent drivers himself. They quarreled and fumed, although over what Chappe had no idea. The frigid night lent a sense of urgency to an otherwise rather comical situation. Suffering frostbite—or worse—was a real possibility if they did not get help. Chappe fortunately did have a multilingual communicator with him: a single Russian ruble (equivalent to about $75 today). Showing it to his drivers, Chappe conveyed through gestures and whatever words the group had in common that he’d pay one of the drivers to go back to Riga and get help. Everyone volunteered. Each volunteer took a horse and shot off toward town, leaving Chappe and his babbling translator behind with the abandoned sleighs. By midnight, torches and townsfolk—plus a false start involving more bribes and torn rope—had finally set the party moving again, back on carriage wheels. As his carriage bumped along, Chappe caught a little sleep through a turbulent night. The snow grew heavier, though, and before long they wished they were back on sledges again. A morning snow squall left the carriages barely moving forward as the horses stopped every minute. To make matters worse, the baggage carriage overturned into a ditch with a tremendous crash. Earlier in the journey, when traveling by coach from Paris to Strasbourg, his group’s baggage cart suffered a similar calamity. In his wreck outside Strasbourg, Chappe had jumped out of his carriage to check on the delicate scientific instruments in the cart. At the moment, though, the road-weary traveler had no impulse to dive into the snowy wreckage. Over an unpleasant din of whinnies, blows, and snorts, horses were settled down and reharnessed, and the carriage was righted. The road widened as the sun sank. Just outside of Wolmar (today Valmiera, Latvia), the wind, in concert with a hedgerow of trees, had swept out a long line of snow banks. The coachmen carefully drove the horses through the gauntlet. The road beneath remained rocky as before, although the banks’ smooth-blown surfaces fleetingly suggested fewer potholes in the road than there actually were. Then everything sank. As suddenly as a musket shot, the startled horses and lead carriage fell into a snowed-over sinkhole. Once Chappe and his companions recovered from the shock, they looked around to see the entire stagecoach had been buried. Only an opening in the vehicle’s roof allowed the battered passengers to exit. The horses struggled to keep their heads above the snow, their eyes wide with panic. The driver of the baggage carriage—which remained outside the sinkhole—jumped down and unhitched his team. The once quiet Russian roadside now echoed with a brace of shouts,

heaves, and misunderstood commands. All hands now worked to rescue the animals and the buried coach from their icy interment using the only horsepower they had available. No bribes (at least none Chappe considered worth recording) passed hands this time as one of the drivers rode to town to get shovels. The group spent the better part of the day excavating the horses, vehicle, and equipment from the snowdrift. Their cold, wet clothes, icy gear, and shell-shocked steeds made the drivers swear off carriage wheels for good. At the next town, the drivers installed runners on the convertible carriage. And at the next major posting station—the university town of Derpt (present-day Tartu, Estonia)—the travelers traded the converted vehicles for horse-drawn sleighs. This time the weather cooperated, and no snowless patches conspired to hinder the group’s progress. Sobering windchills kept normally exposed cheeks and necklines hidden beneath scarves and collars. But other than the trouble of additional layers, the party’s final fortnight toward St. Petersburg was smooth as the ride itself. As the travelers approached the colossal Russian palace that was their destination on February 13, familiar sounds that Chappe and his servants hadn’t heard since Vienna pricked up their ears—conversations in courtly French. Russian empress Elizabeth, although largely uneducated, took pride in importing erudite western European culture into her realm. To her, this meant all things French: language, music, dance, art, and cuisine.10 Elizabeth’s Winter Palace—stunning and magnificent like Versailles—offered up French gastronomical delights for the starving travelers. And its halls resounded with French courtly music like the harpsichord variations of Jacques Duphly or clavichord compositions of Johann Schobert. The opulent Winter Palace (today part of the Hermitage Museum) concealed the busy activity of its hundreds of residents and attendants—whose attention was now trained on the distinguished visitors from the west. Yet for all its comforts, the Winter Palace also harbored an uncomfortable surprise. Despite her admiration for French erudition, Elizabeth had also signed off on two competing Russian Venus transit expeditions to two sites near Lake Baikal—some 1,500 miles farther east than Chappe’s destination. Not all of Elizabeth’s court shared their empress’s Francophilia, and indeed perhaps the most revered Russian astronomer of the day, Mikhail Lomonosov, did not want to see his nation cede to a foreigner the unique opportunity for the advancement of Russian science that the 1761 Venus transit provided.11 Nevertheless, having mollified her patriotic Russian scientists with their own pair of expeditions, Elizabeth commanded that Chappe journey to Tobolsk with royal sanction. The lead horse on his team of sleighs would carry a special bell in its harness, signaling all Russians traveling the icy roads to clear the way for a vehicle of “royal post.” Chappe requested both a top clockmaker and a translator to join his Siberian caravan as well, provisions that were soon made. Finally on March 10, four sleighs glided eastward out of the Russian capital and into the greatest expanse of frozen wilderness the world scarcely knew.